Pax Britannica (53 page)

The edge between Anglo and Irish was difficult to define, and became in practice a distinction of religion. Protestants, by and large, lived south of the Liffey, Catholics north, and Anglo-Irish society was as reluctant to cross Sackville Bridge into the Catholic quarters of the north as was the London upper crust to venture south of the Thames into Southwark or darkest Battersea. But Irishness, as the world thought of it, was common to both sides. The Irish literature of the day was mostly Anglo-Irish, and there was little that was Gaelic to the genius of men like Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde—Yeats liked to sit and meditate among the imperial monuments of St Patrick’s. Dublin was an English city with regional eccentricities, still an alien enclave, a Pale, clustered around its
protective castle: for it really was a castle, with ancient military origins, and it stood on a slight elevation above the rest of the city, as though to keep an eye on things.
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Ireland was the only one of the Queen’s dominions whose love for Her Majesty appeared to the British less than absolute. In fact the Irish probably bore no more grudge against Victoria than did the French Canadians, but whereas in Quebec the discontent of nationalists was bottled up in introspection, in Ireland it had repeatedly burst into violence. The British in Dublin were all the more determined to show the flag and beat the drum for Jubilee. They were, however, handicapped. Military grandeur was hard to come by, when the forces in Ireland were virtually an army of occupation, constantly on guard, and unable to leave their camps across the island. Lord Roberts, the Commander-in-Chief, had gone to London to lead the imperial troops in the Jubilee procession, and the commander in Dublin, Major-General Lord Frankfort de Montmorency, had gone to England too (by the Holyhead route, of course).
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The cruiser
Melampus
and the gunboat
Gossamer
had both sailed away from Kingstown for the Spithead review, taking the Admiral with them, and leaving nothing to fire a signal salute in Dublin Bay. All they could scrape up for the Jubilee parade in Phoenix Park were three squadrons of the 3rd Hussars and four battalions of miscellaneous infantry. ‘As a military display’, the
Irish
Times
had to admit, ‘the review cannot be considered a success—the paucity of troops … threw more or less a damper on the proceedings.’

But they did their best. The obligatory free dinners, flag-hoistings and illuminations were announced, and the
Irish
Times
published the inescapable Jubilee Ode:

An Irish Honours List was published, too, among those honoured being Mr Reginald Guinness and Lord Roberts; there was a big thanksgiving service in St Patrick’s, attended by all the nabobs of the Ascendancy; ‘than the bicycle races’, one observer wrote, ‘nothing finer could have been witnessed. Many of the performances established records for pluck and endurance.’

‘Everything was orderly and peaceable’, reported the
Irish
Times
ruefully next day, ‘till about half-past nine o’clock, and then a slight break was made in the smoothness of the proceedings.’ An aggressive crowd of Irishmen marched down Dame Street, shouting, brandishing sticks, beating tin cans, singing nationalist slogans and carrying a black flag, which was hoisted at half mast above the City Hall. They smashed windows, wrenched lamp standards out of their sockets, fought with the police and climbed all over the statue of William III—one young man was seen sitting on the royal shoulders, pummelling the curly-wigged head. From the roof of the National Club, a stronghold of Irish dissent, a shower of stones hailed down on the police below. All the best shop windows were broken in Henry and Mary Streets, fights broke out all over the city, and some 200 casualties were brought into the Jervis Street hospital alone. All over Dublin orators sprang to their soap-boxes. In Phoenix Park the beautiful Miss Maude Gonne, at a meeting demanding the
amnesty of ten political prisoners held in England, cried in her lovely and very English voice (for she was the daughter of an English colonel) that they would never obtain anything from England until they were able to wrench it from her ‘in some hour of danger or defeat, which, pray God, may come soon’. The police got boos and brickbats everywhere, and at 10.30 a second procession appeared in the streets. It carried a draped coffin with skull and crossbone flags, and marched towards the Castle to the beat of a muffled drum. One of its banners carried the words ‘The Record Reign’, the next said ‘Starved to Death’.

The crowd groaned in sympathy as it passed, somebody struck up
The
Boys
of
Wexford
, and all the electric illuminations went out.

The
Irish
Times
blushed. Ireland had made itself ‘the scorn of the British Empire’. When numbers of Dubliners were charged next day with disorderly conduct the magistrate said the city seemed to have been ‘in a state of siege’: in the coroner’s court the inquest on a woman killed during the disturbances degenerated into a nationalist demonstration, with coroner, police, jury and public exchanging hot-tempered insults. The news from the provinces, too, hardly made reassuring reading up at the Castle. There had been disloyal scenes at Cork and Waterford, and at Limerick, where an Australian gift of 900 sheep carcasses and 340 quarters of beef had been distributed to the poor, a crowd of women hooted and booed anyone who applied for it, sometimes seizing the meat from the unfortunate indigents and throwing it into the Shannon. The Jubilee had not been exactly a fiasco, but nobody could pretend that the Irish had celebrated it in any mood of loyal conciliation.

Where there was not actual opposition there was sometimes mischievous parody, for one of the most potent Irish weapons was mockery. Every sort of Irish celebrity turned out to be having a jubilee that year. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Daniel O’Connell, first prophet of Irish independence, and this was celebrated with innumerable High Masses. It was the thirteenth centennial of the death of St Columba, and this was commemorated,
in the very month of Victoria’s Jubilee, with immense and fervent ceremony on a mountain slope in Donegal. Monsignors and parish priests in many parts of Ireland celebrated their own jubilees or anniversaries, with parish feasts and episcopal messages. There was more rejoicing that summer over the Golden Jubilee of Canon O’Hanlon of Sandymount, author of a well-loved book about the Irish saints, than there was over the Diamond Jubilee of Alexandrina Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

For though this was, by Irish standards, a moment of political hiatus, still the anger of the people was slowly gathering its strength, and combining in movements peaceable and militant. The Irish had almost had enough. Catholic emancipation and agrarian reform had done little to blunt their passions. Their detestation of English rule was constantly underestimated by the British, whose worst prejudices were aroused by Irish hostility, and whose contempt for Irish abilities was profound. ‘The moment the name of Ireland is mentioned’, Sydney Smith had written, ‘the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence, and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants, and the fatuity of idiots.’ They could not grasp the force of the separatist movement in Ireland—not just an adolescent craze or a pastime for cranks, but an expression of centuries of emotion, almost ready to flower into revolution. They were also abysmally ignorant about Ireland. Even Gladstone only went there once, and Lord Salisbury never went at all, declaring himself unable to face the miseries of the sea crossing.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood—the Fenians—had long been preparing for violence. Its great strength was among the Irish of the United States—‘America,’ as a speaker said at Miss Gonne’s meeting in Phoenix Park, ‘the greater Ireland beyond the seas, where there are millions of Irishmen, disciplined, armed, ready to fight for Ireland.’ The Fenians had already mounted one unsuccessful revolution, in 1866, had abortively invaded Canada, and had committed various sorts of outrage in England, including raiding the arsenal of Chester Castle. But a host of less provocative bodies also stoked the patriotic fires. The Gaelic League worked for a revival of the
Celtic ways and language. The Gaelic Athletic Association wished all young Irishmen to play ancient Irish games like hurling and Gaelic football—games chiefly remarkable, as one apprehensive policeman wrote, for their savagery. The embryo Irish trade union movement was strongly nationalist. The Phoenix Literary and Debating Group, in Cork, was really an armed revolutionary movement, and in the mountains of the south fervent young Irishmen practised drill formations at night, or greased their rifles in isolated farmhouses. Ireland murmured, as Kipling wrote, with ‘the secret half a country keeps, the whisper in the lanes’.

It was not a mass movement. Most Irishmen were politically numb, and few demanded more than Home Rule within the Empire. But already the portents were ominous. In Belfast the Ulstermen, encouraged by the Conservative-Unionists in London, bound themselves ever more stubbornly to union with Britain—Home Rule would be Rome Rule, Ulster Will Fight and Ulster Will Be Right. ‘We declare to the people of Great Britain’, a mammoth Ulster convention had resolved in 1892, ‘that the attempt to set up … an all-Irish Parliament will result in disorder, violence and bloodshed.’ In the south, too, the threats were becoming more explicit. ‘Let us work together,’ cried the young poet Patrick Pearse, the son of an English father, ‘and exact a good measure from the English. But if we are deceived there are those in Ireland, and I am one of those, who will counsel the Gael to have no further dealings with the English, but to answer them with the sword’s edge.’ ‘
Live
Ireland
—
Perish
the
Empire!
’ was an old Irish slogan now revived: and far away in Lourenço Marques the British Consul, Roger Casement, was already cherishing an Irish patriotism which the British would consider treasonable, and which was never better expressed than he would one day tragically express it himself: ‘Ireland has outlived the failure of her hopes, and yet she still has hopes. Ireland has seen her sons, aye, and her daughters too, suffer from generation to generation always from the same cause, meeting always the same fate, and always at the hand of the same power; and always a fresh generation has passed on to withstand the same oppression. … The cause that begets this indomitable persistence, the faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the memory of her lost
liberty, this surely is the noblest cause that men ever strove for, ever lived for, ever died for.’
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The noblest cause? Treason or patriotism? Splendid defiance or squalid disobedience? It was around the name of Ireland that the moral problems of imperialism first assembled: whether one race ever had the right to rule another, and whether the end could justify the means. The miseries of Ireland had infected England, too, and the Irish question was the most crippling of all the imperial burdens. The Irish garrisons, and the Royal Irish Constabulary, were terribly expensive. The Irish M.P.s were a plague to Parliament. The Home Rule movement had split the Liberal Party and toppled the most revered statesman in Europe from his Premiership. Ireland was always on the English mind, like a nearer Egypt. It was a backward people, properly part of the White Man’s Burden. It was a proud and ancient people, only kept backward by oppression. It was a nation incapable of self-government. It was incapable of self-government only because it had never been allowed to try. It was really British anyway, and had no right to separate loyalties. It was a Celtic entity, different in race, custom and religion. It would prosper only as part of a greater whole. It would prosper only when it stood on its own feet. It was a nuisance. It was heroic. It was blind. It was prophetic. It did not know its own luck. It had lived in tragedy for eight centuries. Free Ireland and you would dismember the Empire. Hold Ireland and the Empire would never be serene.

Oh Ireland, Ireland, green and bitter island! ‘That cloud in the west,’ Gladstone had called it. ‘That coming storm! The minister of God’s retribution upon cruel injustice!’